As American Archives Month comes to a close, we take another look into the history of American poetry as captured in photos, this time with the help of our friends at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, who recently launched their LaVerne Harrell Clark Photographic Collection. The online gallery, which was launched in August 2016, features more than 1,000 digitized portraits of poets taken by the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s first director, LaVerne Harrell Clark. Dating from around 1960 to 2007, the photos depict poets at the Poetry Center and other locations in Tucson. Among the hundreds of poets captured in the collection are Ai, John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Amiri Baraka, Philip Levine, Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, Alice Walker, C. K. Williams, and many more. Browse a selection of photos from the Laverne Harrell Clark Photographic Collection above and see the full archive on the University of Arizona Poetry Center website.

browse the full photographic collection